Passion is a relative term.

Nobody goes to work at Facebook or Google thinking "wow, I'm so passionate about adverts and tracking, I want to build a world with more ads and tracking in more places". It's normal not to be passionate about your work in that sense.

However, some people find computers frustrating, stupid or boring. Such a person probably wouldn't enjoy a job working with them all the time - and it's difficult to build the skills that let you advance your career if you're averse to or bored by practising them. You need to be passionate in the sense of finding the work sufficiently non-loathsome that you can readily motivate yourself to do it.

> You need to be passionate in the sense of finding the work sufficiently non-loathsome that you can readily motivate yourself to do it.

That is a major abuse of "passion". While the original definitions are even stronger, something you are "passionate" about is something you actively seeking out to do. Something that is merely "sufficiently non-loathsome" is not a passion.

  That is a major abuse of "passion".

That's just the gap between what employers hope for when they place a job advert, and what they get.

I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen. Someone I can promote, and trust with more responsibility and less supervision.

But I'll tolerate someone who does 75% of the expected amount of work, because I'm realistic about the hiring market.

> I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen.

I had a job where I did this. Know what the employer did? He whined I wasn't doing enough, and gave me more to do then expected me to stay even later to do it.

I was eventually spending more time at work than I was at home - I no longer work for free. If an employer wants extra hours out of me, they pay or I head home at clock out time.

Employment isn't about your dream being fulfilled, it's a commercial agreement between two parties where one agrees to pay the other for time spent at the workplace. I don't live to work, I work to live, and I have other stuff to do.

On my death bed, the one thing I can guarantee that I will never think is "I wish I'd worked an extra evening for free on that project for my employer." It's far more likely to be "I wish I hadn't worked that evening for free, so I could have seen the sun set just one more time."

This. How can people say something so wrong headed like "Passion is a relative term." No you're just manipulative.

Passion: strong and barely controllable emotion.

"sufficiently non-loathsome...motivate yourself to do it" is a far cry from passionate. Tangentially related @sarahmei on twitter wrote a thread about passion in tech. IMO she nails it: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/921366047122268165

Passion comes from a Latin root meaning "to suffer". If you work in technology long enough, you will become passionate about it.

I am not sure this lady knows what it means to be passionate then. Dismissing passion as the domain of stuffy white men is to dismissing anyone with an overridingly strong interest in anything

I think you are missing her point. She isn't saying that all passionate people are affluent white males. My interpretation is that passion in a swe job description is code for affluent white male. I think she has a point, individuals who have time for passion projects, self study, or other endeavors are privileged. Many of them are white, male, and affluent.

I think the problem is that she falls in the same error as the companies she's criticizing - she conflates passion with external signals like "spending a lot of time on personal projects". At first she uses quotes around "passionate", which seems to distinguish the two, but then she fully conflates them. Inevitably, she will rile up those of us who were passioned about tech despite not having the means to dedicate ourselves to it.

Which is a shame, because her point that filtering candidates based on their dedication of personal time to tech is discriminatory is valid.

  she conflates passion with external signals like
  "spending a lot of time on personal projects"

Job interviewers fear being mislead by people telling them what they want to hear, so they will often look for provable actions and demonstrable knowledge, rather than claims.

If someone tells me they're passionate about embedded electronics, I'll ask what they've worked with - arduino? raspberry pi? esp8266? atmel? pic? mbed? - and what they've done with it.

If they haven't used any of them, or they've barely used them, are they really passionate?

Sure, but that's where her criticism is valid - there are many reasons why a person might not be able to fulfill their passion, and some groups are disproportionately affected by that filter.

This woman completely catches what my college experiences were for me. Great read. From all the data I've seen poverty level is the biggest factor that determines your future potential with race right behind, one would think that we would try to make opportunity the main goal in an advanced society. Not everyone will or wants to be financially successful but when the two things that weigh heaviest on where you end up are where you start financially and what color/gender you are that's not a sustainable or fair system.

>However, some people find computers frustrating, stupid or boring. Such a person probably wouldn't enjoy a job working with them all the time - and it's difficult to build the skills that let you advance your career if you're averse to or bored by practising them.

It's funny really because I thought I was perfect for software development as a teenager. Already knew how to program, spent a huge amount of my free time on a computer, good at maths and sciences in general, etc.

Once I actually got into software development I found the whole thing rather irksome. The company I worked for was a great place to work full of really lovely people, free lunches, paid internships (yay NZ), etc. But software development? Nope. Awful industry. Computers are shit.

As soon as I got out of software, I immediately found my interest in programming as a hobby come back. Unsurprisingly people don't really like doing something as a hobby when they're paid to do it for 40 hours per week already.

What's your current job if i may ask? I'm in the same boat as you now.

Yes you can, I’ve been in tech companies where a fair few of my colleagues are not interested in tech. They want to be part of a “winning” organisation and make money.

I sure as hell wouldn’t hire someone who has no interest in what my company is doing and that level of interest would have to increase relative to the role.

What tends to happen is you get very slick operators who don’t produce anything because they don’t understand/don’t care and all they do is get information from A spin it in a way that makes them look fantastic and push it to B.

Given enough people like that in a tech org it’ll collapse.

I used to work on email archival. Anyone who says they’re passionate about that is either lying or doped up on barbiturates.

I think there are two sides of equation. You can be passionate about the literal problem (search, AI, whatever) or the underlying problem with tech (I could imagine finding interesting problems around new indexing techniques, rapid access, etc if you wanted to really get into the nitty gritty)

How did you get hired for email archival? Started looking at online applications and every single one has something like "Why do you want to work for us?" and yesterday I saw "How do you add to our diversity?"

What's the problem with those questions?

I wouldn't be surprised to find that in the UK it's illegal to ask a candidate "How do you add to our diversity?" because it could be seen as a thinly veiled way to, for example, discover a candidate's sexual preference - something you are outright not allowed to ask about, except in very specific circumstances[1].

(Also, it's an insufferably pretentious question, even if not actually illegal.)

[1] E.g., it might be legally acceptable for a role in a religious organisation.

I'd argue that they're stupid questions.

What do you stand to learn about the quality/fit of a candidate from the question "why do you want to work with us?"

They could give a 100% bombshell answer and yet not at all fit the role.

The latter is not a question the applicant is qualified to answer. Specifically, "how do you add to <our team>" can only be answered by someone that already knows the team. To me it signals that the recruiter is lazy and expects me, as applicant, to do his job for him.

Sorry, was trying to figure out how the commenter got past those filtering questions.

It depends on the content of the emails.

Tech work is like sex work: you don't need to feel the passion, but you do need to be able to fake it.

I'm stealing that line.

Touche

Anecdata: to me and others I've spoken to 'passion' is short hand for a person having personal work standards. i.e.: a person who won't half-ass their work, who'll often go the extra distance for polish or feature completion, and who'll proactively help raise issues if their experience indicates the team is heading down the wrong path.

And yes, a person who'll very occasionally stay late and pitch in when the whole team is crunching on something.

I think it always helps to care about the quality of your craft. "Passion" seems to be the prevalent HR-speak for that concept.

You have to have had some level of passion to bother learning about it.

It takes time to learn a topic, that's a form of passion - a drive.

That's not to say you have to burn all hours on it tho. Which I think is what you're assuming there. That's honestly somewhat unhealthy and only super passionate people (and lucky ones at that) can do that for any length of time.

Not really.. I have friends with no interest in computers but who studied CS because they knew it would lead to a well paying job. They work at Amazon and Google now so I guess it worked out for them.

One requires motivation, but that motivation does not necessarily have to be interested or passion.

In that case they have a passion for making money ;)

That’s what motivated them to learn. I doubt that’s what causes them to stay. If it is tho... That’s enough.

Passion requires enthusiasim, not merely drive.

And spending effort to learn something requires some level of enthusiasm

I disagree. I have learned plenty of things I had no enthusiasm for because they were a means to an end.

> Can I not work in tech without being passionate?

You can, but from the employer's perspective many markets have more applicants than positions. The employer can choose those who are closer to the ideal employee. One of the qualities of such an employee is often someone who throws themselves with passion into doing the job.

Put another way, why should an employer with a stack of applicants pick those who aren't as motivated or qualified as others? That is why entry-level positions require 3 years of experience.

Yes but you have to be able to fake it for at least the duration of an interview.

Yes you can. Many people work in tech and are not passionate. And plenty of them are very good and responsible.

Tech is not something special, you can lean it like anything else.

It's a cultural-fit thing. You can, but there are the zealous who will deny you.